Cos, there a couple of good books I can recommend as a starting point. Luke Beardon's Adults with Autism and Aspergers and Sarah Hendrickx's Women and Girls with Aspergers are both excellent introductory reads for anyone. And much nicer than immersing yourself in some of SBC's deficit-medical-language shit. Sarah Hendrickx (aka Saint Sarah
) diagnosed me when I went private (the wait on the NHS was too much for me to cope with).
The working class women rant is a general women and girls rant. Adult women with an autism diagnosis fall very much into two camps. Either their behaviours and issues have been obvious from a very early age and are such that they're probably not able to live independently, OR, they're like me, university educated, working, bright. And the latter group all have private diagnosis, pretty much, because you need to be able to afford to pay in order to get at someone educated and trained enough to recognise the traits. And not (as I know has happened) be sent out because 'you have a job, you can't be autistic' and 'you make eye contact, you can't be autistic', 'you're not non-verbal'. I reckon there's huge swathes of undiagnosed adult women out there who fall between the two groups and it really hurts me because I know how much some of them will be struggling.
SBC's AQ test and the extreme male brain theory means professionals haven't been looking for it in girls. And where a boy might have 'obvious' (stereotypical) traits, like an obsession over tractors and trains and lining things up, girls tend to have special interests that fall much more in line with societal expectations. I read. Ceaselessly. I didn't do brownies or dance class or any of that little girl stuff, I sat alone in my room reading. I was genuinely very happy as a child.. :)) (More on that later if you're interested). Girls are conditioned from an early age to fit in, to be docile, to behave. So they force down and mask more of the obvious autistic behaviours. They don't barge through conversations, because they've learned it's bad form. They are usually obedient (autistics do, generally, like rules). And then when they get to teenage years, they either get very good at pretending, or they implode, or both. There's a whole swathe of autistic women out there who have had eating disorders (I tried that one) or self harm issues etc. (It's cost me a fucking fortune in tattoos).
So the working class women are missing out. One I know from Twitter was referred for diagnosis to a speech and language therapist and an occupational therapist. They asked her to play with some toys whilst they observed her then told her she couldn't be autistic because she was a good mother. :verm: And it's important, because if you spend a lifetime hiding, it comes out in shit mental health. And because if there's no diagnosed autistic women, there's no role models. It's shit.
I am going climbing now, I will pick up some other stuff later. And also hand over to Smunder, my glamorous assistant. :lol:
I am so glad things are looking up and making sense. I did have an idea of things and am glad you are throwing it out here and I would love to hear your rant. I had a massive rant at A yesterday about the gender pay gap as he genuinely didn't think it could be that bad, he fully didn't believe it until I pressed his face up to some articles about it (my company came out terrible in a recent study) and demonstrated some examples in Excel, so I'm in the zone about ALL of this shit at the moment :lol:
